is a struggle, that people are ‘shit’ and they literally live in a perpetual pool of problems. At some point, we have all been this person, myself included. The amount of drama I have created in my life, well … that is a story for a whole other book, “The Mischief and Misadventures of Tatz,’ perhaps.
There are a couple pivotal moments of conscious change in my life, where I stopped in my tracks, changed my mind and thought to myself that this way no longer works for me and I no longer choose these patterns. The more I did this, the more it happened, and I learned how to become the observer of myself and start consciously creating change in my life.
I began to become aware of my body, my thoughts, my feelings and the relationship between them. I started questioning my beliefs and the energy that I had vested in them. I opened myself up to change, whatever that meant, and allowed the old me to be stripped back and the true me that was underneath all along, to be revealed.
So, if everything is energy, including our thoughts, feelings and beliefs, then the question begs, what is it that you are creating in your life and how much energy are you putting into the things that do not serve you? See, the problem person I mentioned earlier is stuck on the hamster wheel, cycling through the same emotions, recreating the same stories and reinforcing old neural pathways that create the same chemical release in the body and can create a physical addiction to the hormones of stress, which means that every so often we are going to require that fix and so we need some discomfort, some intensity to boil up. and create a bit of drama for us so that we can get it.
As I mentioned earlier, those of us that live in stress states are communicating with the body to be ready for fight, flight, freeze or faint. We are on hyper-alert and driving the energy away from our internal organs. We are producing excessive stress hormones in the body and we are unable to sustain this for long periods of time without it creating a lasting effect. As we learn how to regulate and bring ourselves into a coherent state, we can now consciously take charge of our energy; build our resilience and enhance our ability to cope in stressful situations.
Just as we train the muscles of our body to perform in various ways through repetition, so too can we train our brain through repetition and what this means is that we have to first know ourselves, become aware of our limiting beliefs and stories, acknowledge our trigger points, take responsibility for ourselves and begin the practise of transforming ourselves into a new consciousness. This may sound daunting and, truth be told, sometimes it definitely is not pretty as we have to let down the walls that we have built and step into being vulnerable. This is a journey of sitting in the fire and allowing ourselves to move through all that has held us back. It takes determination and effort, plus a dose of courage at times. You must be alert as you begin the process of counteractive thought. You must be willing to allow yourself to go into the shadow spaces, sit in them and open your Heart to them. You must be willing to meet the darkness within you with love and know that this too has a rightful place in the sanctuary of your Soul.
Many of us have experienced major trauma in our lives and may not wish to go into the painful memories and spaces of what that trauma was for us, and understandably so. Yet, with the help and guidance of a skilled Mentor it is possible to work through the trauma and enter into to it with a different consciousness and come out the other side with a new perspective and a stronger resolve. We can turn our trauma into great teachers that open us up into truth and love. We can meet the Divine within ourselves through our healing journey and expand our inner knowing that we are far greater than this Human experience; far greater than our suffering; far greater than our experiences; far greater than our thoughts and beliefs. We can access the unlimited potential of ourselves and recognise the true power that we hold within. So, while diving into the darkness can be scary, especially when we have pushed all that icky stuff down into the deepest depths hoping to never look at it again, it is deeply powerful when we move through it shining the light of truth and love, bringing balance and equality. It is deeply empowering to journey into the inner shadow realms and explore all that we have disavowed of ourselves, integrate the wisdom that resides therein and finally let the ghosts free.
Imagine this if you will, throughout your life you have moved through experiences, some of them hold beautiful memories and others have created uncomfortable ones. If you were not taught how to effectively cope in your life or were not supported properly in moving through the struggles or the traumas you may have experienced, you began building a protective wall. With each experience the wall grows higher and wider and it holds all of the pent up emotions associated with these events, it holds all the stories and beliefs that you have gathered over the years of your life that contain charged emotion; it holds all the negative things you have ever been told or told yourself; it holds your generational and ancestral stories, beliefs and traumas; it holds all the suffering that you have not looked at or allowed yourself to feel and release, and on the other side of the wall is you. You must continuously work to keep the wall up. Every so often a brick comes loose, and some intense emotion comes pouring out and you find something as fast as you can to plug it up and close it once again. Yet these bricks are all scabby wounds and you cannot help yourself but pick at them by creating people and experiences that rip the scab off and bleed out some of this pent-up emotion. It is hard holding this wall in place and keeping all that gunk dammed up.
When we begin the process of sitting in the fire, we must let go of the wall and it is up to us how quickly or slowly we do this. Inevitably though, when we start this process, at some point there will be a great surge of release and things may seem chaotic for a time as the river of our Soul is flooded with all that we have held back, but with this flooding comes a deep cleansing. All that has been stagnant within for so long is washed to the ocean and enters the sea of possibility. This is a deep inner cleanse and soon the waters of your river begin to run fresh and clear once more, however, this is something that only you can choose.
See, when we block the flow of energy in our lives through holding ourselves, others or our experiences in anything other than Love we are creating a dam that becomes stagnant and without flow, we are creating blockages within our own selves and we see this reflected into our outer reality. The more we become self-aware the closer we come to self-mastery.
What does this all have to do with energy and the energetic realms? Well, when we step into self-awareness without labelling and judging our experiences we step into the energy and the feeling aspect of ourselves. We notice the energy that moves through us in emotional states, whether heightened in joy and love or fear and suffering. We allow ourselves to truly feel into the inner experience, witnessing where and how it arises in the body, and we start to access a different level of consciousness and intelligence.
In my work I invite people to describe to me the physical manifestations of nervousness in their bodies. In fact, I invite you to take a moment now and feel into where and how being nervous arises in your body. For example, I notice in myself that my body temperature rises and I get sweaty; my heart rate increases and I become fidgety or restless.
Now, take a moment and feel into what happens in your body when you get excited. I notice in myself that my body temperature rises and I get sweaty; my heart rate increases and I become fidgety and restless. Exactly the same physical experience, which means that the energy of these experiences would be remarkably similar. I am yet to meet a person who does not say that it is the same for them too, that their experiences in the body match when nervous or excited.
Knowledge is power and understanding this similarity opens us up to the possibility of shifting from nervous to excited and transmuting the energy of the moment into something that is rich and valuable for our experiences. The more we know the charge of energy in motion (emotion) in our bodies, the easier it is to channel it productively. This is one way to turn metal into gold and become the alchemists that we are.
So many of us have been living separate from our bodies for one reason or another. Our consciousness has been governed by societal norms on what constitutes beauty and so our relationships with our bodies have become distorted. Those of us who have
